University Of Cambridge Faculty

"In each and every one of us lies a message. It is inscribed in an ancient code, its beginnings lost in the mists of time. Decrypted, the message contains instructions on how to make a human being. Nobody wrote the message; nobody invented the code. They came into existence spontaneously. Their designer was Mother Nature herself, working only within the scope of her immutable laws and capitalizing on the vagaries of chance.The message isn't written in ink or type, but in atoms, strung together in an elaborately arranged sequence to form DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the most extraordinary molecule on Earth."

"The laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind. To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way."

"The thing that separates life from non-life is information."

"Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right place, at the right time. ...[T]he power of information to sculpt [living] physical forms."

"I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate."

"Seventy-five years ago Erwin Schrödinger published... '... the key point... was whether life can be explained by physics. ...Schrödinger ...said "We must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing...""

"[T]his is something that can't be defined locally. It's got to be defined globally, in the context of the system as a whole. ...[T]hat's a very difficult thing for physicists to cope with because we're used to formulating all our laws of physics as local laws, and not as global laws."

"That the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence."

"Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information."

"The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God."

"Science, it is usually believed, helps us to build a picture of objective reality – the world 'out there'. With the advent of the quantum theory, that very reality appears to have crumbled, to be replaced by something so revolutionary and bizarre that its consequences have not yet been properly faced."

"All this prompts the question of why, from the infinite rage of possible values that Nature could have selected for the fundamental constants, and from the infinite variety of initial conditions that could have characterized the primeval universe, the actual values and conditions conspire to produce the particular range of special features that we observe. For clearly the universe is a very special place: exceedingly uniform on a large scale, yet not so precisely uniform that galaxies could not form; extremely low entropy per proton, and hence cool enough for chemistry to happen; almost zero cosmic propulsion and an expansion rate tuned to that energy content to unbelievable accuracy; values for the strengths of its forces that permit nuclei to exist, yet do not burn up all the cosmic hydrogen, and many more apparent accidents of fortune."

"In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics;it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night."

"The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown."

"What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"..."

"I'm using this term demonic cut by analogy with the Cartesian cut..."

"[I]f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in , could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ...[Perhaps] only if you can create a region of the De Sitter space that is screened out from that horizon... from that thermal nature. If you put a reflective barrier around the demon, you then have De Sitter space, but with the horizon screened out. ...[T]hat's a problem I'm working on now ..."

"Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident."

"We are none of us infallible—not even the youngest of us."

"Barnes was notorious for delivering what the press called his "guerilla sermons," in which he pointed out the need for the church to be honest in admitting how much of its traditional dogma would have to be abandoned if evolution theory was accepted. Even a progressionist, teleological evolutionism required a reinterpretation of the doctrine of original sin. To begin with, Barnes said little about the actual process of evolution, but he seems to have assumed that it was purposeful and aimed at the production of higher mental states. In 1930, though, he obtained a copy of R. A. Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection and began a correspondence with Fisher, who had studied under him while a student at Cambridge. Barnes was one of the few clergymen who could actually understand Fisher's mathematics (although even he admitted that it was hard going)... He did not concede that the selection theory offered a complete explanation, and he continued to believe that evolution was intended to produce beings with higher mental and spiritual qualities, but he was now aware that the more simpleminded forms of teleology were unacceptable."

"The philosophical consequences of the General Theory of Relativity are perhaps more striking than the experimental tests. As Bishop Barnes has reminded us, "The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing." We have assumed that the laws of nature must be capable of expression in a form which is invariant for all possible transformations of the space-time co-ordinates and also that the geometry of space-time is Riemannian. From this exiguous basis, formulae of gravitation more accurate than those of Newton have been derived. As Barnes points out..."

"The Roman Catholics were already prominent in the debate on abortion in Britain in the 1930s. It is notable, for example, that only two religious groups were keen to give evidence before the Inter-Departmental Committee in Abortion between 1937 and 1939 or sent written statements to the Committee. One was the Modern Churchmen's Union, and in particular its most prominent supporter, though not a member, Ernest William Barnes, the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, which was concerned to advance the cause of abortion on eugenic grounds, and the other was the Roman Catholics... No representatives of the Protestant Nonconformist Churches took part or made statements (Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee 1939)"

"Revelation can be supplemented by reason. Christ Himself gave reasons for His belief, and put in modern form, these reasons are, to my mind, conclusive. You remember the passage in the earliest Gospel: "But as touching the dead, that they are raised; have ye not read in the book of Moses, in the place concerning the bush, how God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living: ye do greatly err" (Mark xii, 26 R.V.) Herein, in a form adapted to Jewish thought is "the one great argument which has made most sincere believers in God believers in Immortality also."

"Although he was trained in mathematics and was not a biblical scholar... Barnes, undertook to write a book about the origins of the Christian religion. Published in 1947, The Rise of Christianity caused a stir because it was so frankly dismissive of traditional Christian dogma, especially the miraculous. In this book, for example, Barnes calls the birth stories "edifying legend." He observes that the roots of the story of the Virgin Birth are "pagan." He questions the dogma of the Logos—the eternal word incarnate in this man, Jesus—set forth in the first chapter of John's Gospel. And he denies the bodily resurrection of Christ. Like Thomas Jefferson, he admires Jesus' character and teaching."

"The only Bishop (Ernest William Barnes...) in the Royal Society appears to have contracted the habit so prevalent among popular scientists of making stupid and unsupported statements... In his book, Scientific Theory and Religion, he tells us that the flatness and fixity of the earth were "taken over into the Christian Creeds." Which creeds? ...he describes as erroneous the "authorized teaching of the Roman Church" regarding the date of creation. What date did the Church authorize? He also refers to the "doctrine of the special creation of the species." There is no such doctrine. Incidentally one of the most eminent of English mathematicians, Professor Whittaker, F.R.S., severely criticizes the mathematical theories that are put forward in this book by Bishop Barnes."

"Our own attitude to intercourse with "spirits" must be determined not by the authority of great teachers of the 13th or any other century, but by our examination in the light of the best secular knowledge of our time of the revelation of spiritual truth given by Christ."

"A perfectly evil human society is unthinkable: it would be self-destructive. We therefore deny that any society of absolutely evil spirits could be permanent. Evil in short, cannot be a unifying spiritual principle: to put it colloquially, there must be some good in the Devil or he must ultimately destroy himself. It is certain that the Devil cannot be the creative source of evil in the same way that God is the creative source of good."

"The conclusion seems to be irresistible that such laws of nature as the principle of conservation of energy, the principle of conservation of momentum and the law of gravitation are necessary consequences of our modes of measurement. They are, in fact, elaborately disguised identities which could have been predicted a priori by a being of sufficiently powerful analytical insight who fully understood all that is implied in the way we measure space-time intervals."

"He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman, all rolled into one. He is one of the greatest living mathematicians, with a sly sense of humour, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it."

"Human experience has pronounced "black magic" a delusion. Its practice is criminal folly: criminal because its objective is evil, folly because the means employed are futile."

"The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing."

"We see in man three elements; the material body, the life principle and the element of human personality. The last has only slowly reached its present complexity and is still far from the power and perfection that we can imagine it will some day possess."

"[W]hen... non-predictivity of quantum mechanics was discovered, it came as a great surprise. People tried to explain it away. ...Many ...invented larger theories. ...Nobody has succeeded in making one of these theories relativistically invariant, and physics appears to be relativistically invariant. ...Physicists have believed ...in the result that we're proving for a long time. It's no surprise. "I knew all that," they say. However, what they didn't know was that it can be deduced in this very precise, logical fashion, from so little information... that is not at all contentious. ...[T]hese 3 axioms ...they're routine, they're accepted ...They follow from quantum mechanics and relativity. There's nothing dubious about them ...and that's all we need... [T]he original deductions... [of] quantum mechanics... used more. They used all sorts... and some... were... pretty poorly understood..."

"With a view to recalling Clausen's identity, we begin by introducing the generalized Gaussian and Clausenian hypergeometric function defined, in the notations of Leo Pochhammer and Ernest William Barnes... as already pointed out by Barnes, the generalized hypergeometric function pFq originated with Clausen and was studied, among others, by Johannes Karl Thomae, Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat, and Pochhammer whose voluminous work on the subject provides a detailed development of the theory."

"Man is what he is, because a spiritual element has entered into, and taken possession of, animal consciousness. This spiritual element is not, according to Christian teaching, divine: but it is capable of entering into relations with God. It can perceive Him: in thought, it can reason as to His nature and actions: in will and feeling, it can serve and love Him, or disobey and fear Him. Such activity shows itself in what we call the working of conscience."

"In general, Protestants of that era [late 1930s] did not object to state involvement in reproductive control; indeed, some of the Protestant Churches had originated as extensions of state power in the first place. Many protestants embraced eugenics as part of a broader trend towards acceptance of the secularization of modern societies. ...Many Protestant theologians were outspoken eugenicists, and some even supported eugenic sterilization: in Britain, William Ralph Inge, the dean of St. Paul's and Ernest William Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham; in Germany, Hans Harmsen... in Romania, Alfred Csallner... Such direct involvement with eugenics demonstrates that a religiously sanctioned programme of human improvement was possible."

"There has been the assumption that men are finite spirits. They are, that is to say, not only animals with a brief terrestrial existence, but in them is an element which comes from, and belongs to, the spiritual world. This world we postulate to be the world of eternal reality, of God; and we assume that in it whatever is of God, the things that are good, beautiful and true, will exist for ever with Him. We have then, to justify our belief that, because such God-like qualities exist in human personality, that personality will survive the destruction of the body."

"FIN, the axiom that information can't travel faster than a finite speed, (that's where it gets its name from)... does not have that nice property. ...I can't disprove... that somewhere there isn't an as yet undiscovered way of transmitting information faster than... light. ...FIN ...follows from a symmetry principle that the laws of physics are independent of the coordinate frame ...If you're traveling ...at half the speed of light, you still have the same physics ...That symmetry principle ...that's been tested in countless ways, and that's ...why we believe FIN."

"There is... strong evidence that these three axioms... are true."

"SPIN and TWIN are operationally definable... Do the operation that's called, measuring... as many times as you like, and see that they always give the same answers. That's what is meant by saying that those things are operationally definable..."

"FIN [from finite speed] is the axiom... from relativity theory that information... can't travel faster than the speed of light."

"SPIN... is a... curious axiom. If you take one of these particles and ask it what... it's squared component of spin is, in three... mutually perpendicular directions, it always happens that two of the answers are 1, and one of them is 0. That's most mysterious... and... it's not possible to solve this puzzle. ...[W]e have these 33 directions, and it's not possible to assign 0s and 1s to them, subject to that condition... the 1-0-1 rule. ...[T]he particle is acting somewhat like a little boy ...making up its mind as it goes along. It doesn't stop it from giving answers, but it does stop the answers from being determined ahead of time, and that's the guts of it."

"TWIN... I just described... Even remotely separated particles... a condition in which, if asked the same questions, they will give the same answers. If they're not asked the same questions, all bets are off. ...We call that Twinning the particles ...an instance of ...entanglement."

"You should... believe... in the things that have been tested... strongly until... evidence against them..."

"Here's a particle, and I... direct my finger at it... and ask... What's it's spin in that direction? ...This particle is quantized. ...[I]t can only give two answers ...1 and 0. If I hadn't put that word squared in it could give three answers, 1, -1 and 0 ...Initially, it was... obvious... to believe that this concept existed before you measured it, but that was found not to be so. ...[W]hat the says is that it can't exist before you measure it... because there's no consistent set of answers to every question."

"If I ask this question of this particle, and... my colleague on Mars asks the same question of the other particle, then even though those questions aren't determined, ...they don't exist ahead of time, ...they'll give the same answer. ...It's meaningless to compare the times at which we do it, because time is not an invariant concept. ...[I]f my colleague on Mars has asked the same question, or ...will ask the same question... or if he's now asking the same question... he'll get the same answer. That is the EPR paradox, the fantastic thing that Einstein thought would disprove quantum mechanics. It is... perfectly consistent, but ever since it was discovered people have been trying to explain it away... because it's hard to believe."

"When I was a little boy, I had two sisters... and we used to play ...and I had no moral sense ...when playing ...[I]f I thought that my sisters were getting near to my object, I changed ...the object ...[Y]ou have to select a new object which answers the ...questions ...already ...asked ...That's what the particles do. ...If you ask them this ...spin question, they don't have an object in mind. Think of a cleverer boy... who never bothers to select an object... just gives... answers at random, and then starts thinking what the object is. ...[T]hat's what the particles do. They don't have an answer in mind for each direction... [[w:Simon B. Kochen|[K]ochen]] and Specker proved that a long time ago... and the reason... is that there's a little puzzle... that puzzle has no solution. ...[T]hey use 117 directions, but ...Asher Peres ...reduced this set of directions to 33... [T]here's no conceivable set of answers... that's consistent with ...the spin law."

"Don't think... I believe unreservedly in quantum mechanics, but I'm not going to change my mind before there's some reason..."

"[S]uppose I had a twin brother... [M]y sisters would have had a much better chance... [T]hey could... interrogate us separately... Then we can't change the object. ...Without transmitting information ...we couldn't win... [T]hat's what manages to happen in the particle case. ...[T]his ...Simon also thought of a long time ago.... but he didn't... deduce the ."

"[Y]ou've probably heard of the theory of relativity. ...Most of us have heard the assertion that you can't transmit information faster than the speed of light. Most of us... hear it on authority only. We don't really understand why not. ...The reason is ...there's no absolute notion of time. Time depends on which coordinate system you're using... on your frame of reference... As seen from one frame of reference, event A can be before event B and as seen from another frame of reference, event B came first. The world [universe] hasn't got a standard definition of time."